In this sequel to "Imagination", Mary Warnock's aim is to answer the elusive question "why do we value so highly our ability to recall the past?". Her quest centres on an examination of the relationship between the concepts of memory and personal identity as seen both by philsophers and poets, novelists and writers of diaries and autobiographies. She shows that the purely philosophical treatment of memory has parallels in the theories of practising writers. The ideas of self and of memory are inseparable and so, to the extent that we value ourselves, we must necessarily value our memory too. But memory and imagination are also inextricably linked. Since memory is seen to reveal the truth and to be timelessly true, thus it is believed that our ability to recollect is of the utmost value.